turning blood into ink

i know i’ve probably written about these all individually but i’m putting them together in one post. these are writing tricks that are extremely cheap and dirty; when you use them it feels like cheating and honestly by posting them i’m probably exposing all the easy moves in my own work, but more than a writer i am a teacher, so here you go, some writing cheats that have never steered me wrong.

quick character creation

what’s really annoying is when you have two characters sitting at a restaurant or something and the server has to come by. to what degree do you describe the server so that it’s clear they’re just a background character but that they’re not just a faceless form, so that the world has texture without taking up too much space on the page? rule of three, babeyyy: two normal things and a weird one.

she had pale skin and blue eyes but her hair was dyed black like a 2010 emo kid.

he was tall and broad, and he wore a sweatshirt with an embroidered teddy bear on it.

the woman stood there comparing the prices of toilet paper. she had a short angled bob and carried a keychain the length of a trout.

why does it work? it gives the reader something to hang onto, a brief observation that shows the world exists around your narrator. it also works when introducing main characters, but there’s so much action going on that you can’t take time to write a rich long paragraph about them. all you need is a little hook.

quick setting creation

i used to TOIL over descriptive paragraphs. for years i was like, description is my weakness, i must become better at developing imagery. i believed this because a famous writer once projected a paragraph i had written onto a screen and asked my cohort, “count how many images are crafted in this paragraph.” there were none. none! my friends were sitting there like, “we are TRYING” but they couldn’t find any.

i would say that after years of studying imagery development at the sentence level, i am, perhaps, competent at it, but what was more helpful was for me to shrug and tell myself, “i’m just not a writer who does that.”

anyway. my cheat is thus: 

there’s not much you can assume about your audience. the audience is not a homogenous whole. but your ideal audience is something you can guess at, and that means you can play around with their existing knowledge and expectations. 

if you say your characters are in a tacky shit-on-the-walls restaurant, if your ideal reader is an american who went to restaurants during the maximalist era of franchise design, they will conjure their nearest memory of one of those places. and for those readers who aren’t familiar with it, they’ll use other context clues to conjure that space. the point is, you don’t have to list every single stupid license plate nailed to the wall. you can leave it as one detail of one sentence and let your reader extrapolate from there.

if i say the dentist’s office looked like a gutted 90s taco bell, maybe no ideal audience would have ever seen a place like that, but a lot of people can mentally conjure a dentist’s office and a 90s taco bell and overlay them together to create a weird and fun image.

you can go even simpler than that: a bathroom the size of an airplane lavatory. a tiny studio apartment with a hotplate instead of a stove. a mansion with a winding stairwell. the point is that you want to define the size of the space and its general vibes.

in some ways detailed description can be overrated, because your reader conjures images even in absence of them on the page. and for those readers who can’t mentally conjure images, it doesn’t matter anyway; they take you at your word. the trick is to figure out what details are unexpected, relevant to understanding the story and its characters, and those are the things that you add in.

one other note: after working with hundreds of writers on drafting, for *most* of us it’s difficult to develop images and establish setting in a first draft. it’s nearly always something to be saved for a second or later draft. i think it’s because while we’re writing we tend to put character and action first.

nail the landing

there’s a joke i heard once from a writer i really admire: “you know it’s literary fiction if the story ends with a character looking at a body of water.”

and god it’s so painfully sad and true how easy it is to nail the landing of a given story by ending on a totally irrelevant piece of imagery. the final beat of a story followed by your character looking up at the sky and seeing a flock of birds in the shape of a V flying past. or maybe they’re sitting in their car and they count the rings of a nearby church bell. or maybe they watch an elderly couple walk down the sidewalk hand-in-hand. i don’t know!! when in doubt shove an observation, an image, whatever, something neutral at the end and it’ll sound profound. 

(this cheat is the only one that can really bite you in the ass because if the image is too irrelevant you risk tonal incongruity. for use only in the most desperate of times.)

sentence fragments

when writers ask me how to punch up their writing or start developing their own style, my go-to advice is to give up the idea of a complete sentence. fuck noun-verb-object. if you have a series of character actions, knock off the sentence subjects like in script action. if the clause at the end of your sentence is particularly meaningful, don’t separate it with a comma but a period and make it its own thing. if your character is going through something particularly stressful or heinous, that bitch is not thinking in complete thoughts so you don’t have to convey them that way. make punctuation bend to your will!!

rhetorical moves

this one opened a lot of doors for me stylistically. remember that famous writer who called me out on my lack of imagery? i always thought his prose was beautiful, that he’s one of the best living prose writers, etc. once i learned more about rhetoric though, i realized he just employed it a lot. 

usually when we talk about beautiful sentences it means a sentence that uses rhetorical devices. the greeks were like, you know what, when we give speeches there are certain ways to phrase things that make the audience go nuts. let’s identify what those things are and give them names so we can use them intentionally and convince people of our opinions.

i love shakespeare, i really do, but one of the big reasons he’s still a household name today and his plays are still performed is because every sentence of every goddamn play utilizes a rhetorical device. the audience is hard-wired to vibrate at the sound and cadence of his writing, like finding the spot on a dog that makes their foot thump. for five hundred years, william shakespeare has been scritching that spot for us.

i have no idea why, cognitively, rhetorical devices are so effective. i’m no rhetorician. all i know is that well-deployed anaphora makes a reader want to throw their panties on stage. my intro to rhetorical devices was the wonderful book the elements of eloquence by mark forsyth, a surprisingly fun read! hopefully that will open some doors for you the way it did for me. 

the downside to this is that once you know rhetorical devices, it’s like learning how the sausage is made. on one hand, as a writer, you’ll have a lot stronger grasp of style, but as a reader good prose loses some of its magic.  

pacing it out

many writers, myself included, rely on the tried and true “he bit the inside of his cheek” or other some such random action to help pace out dialogue. one time my thesis advisor sat me down and said “you’ve got to take all of those out.”

“all of them?” i said.

“all of them,” she said.

i thought, but that will weaken the text! it didn’t. once i cut what i came to call cheek-biter sentences i never went back. and now when i edit for other people i’m like, look i know where you’re coming from but just cut all these out and see how the scene stands. if it doesn’t feel right you can put some back in. a lot of times when you’re drafting you put those in the way some people say “um.” they’re just sentences you jot while you’re thinking of what the other character says, so from a writing perspective it seems like you’re pacing, but readers don’t read it that way. they just want to get to the next line of dialogue.

but sometimes you really do need to pace out a scene and i think there are other ways to do that that don’t rely on banal physical movements, such as:

interiority: a sentence or paragraph of relevant cognition, bonus points if you weave in background context. good interiority defines the voice of your writing.

observations: i know i just said description is overrated but idk sometimes you just need a character to note the back and forth clacking of one of those desk ball toy things.

character texture: maybe your character notes something about the person they’re talking to. a wilted pocket square. a mole that looks like it needs looked at by a dermatologist. a scar on their forehead. some detail that deepens or complicates our understanding of a character.

narratorial consciousness and access

this one is less a cheat and more a problematic opinion i have that doesn’t win me any popularity in writing circles.

i believe that if you’re writing in first person or close third or any narration which is dedicated to the mind of one character, you are only ever obligated to convey the experience of that character’s consciousness. and nothing else.

by that i mean, if your point of view character is unobservant? then they’re not going to even notice the flight attendant is missing one of their canine teeth. if your pov character is focused and obsessive, they’re going to think lavish, detailed paragraphs about that which they’re obsessed with and have no acknowledgement of the rest of the world. if your pov character has no understanding of time, does your story even need to be linear?

defining the scope of a narrator’s cognition early on can give you parameters in which to work. even if you don’t consciously do this, you still do it. if you write in third person limited present tense without really thinking about it, that’s your scope. i’m just pointing out you can choose to do it differently. you get to define your narrator. 

whenever we talk about narration we also talk about information access and the order of information being revealed/conveyed. writing must always be in order; even if you’re writing multiple concurring things, it still has to be rendered on the page in order one after the next, because the human mind can’t read two sentences over top of one another. 

if we’re restricted to the mind of a character, that means we’re also restricted by their knowledge and experiences, and this can be used to your benefit. i don’t want to take too much space for this but i do talk more about the relationship between narration and reality here.

in short, you the writer get to chose 

what the reader knows,

in what order they know it, and

its relationship to the presumed real events of the story, which develops the (un)reliability of your narrator

The boy is going to a Uni and wearing his best outfit; the Uni sticker is on his luggage, even his tie and his socks are the colours of the sticker. He is excited and impatient. The father - obviously a farmer, is sitting at the worn farm truck with a flag and a storm lamp, because their place is so small the train won’t normally stop there, so the father will need to “catch” the train and signal with the light and the flag for it to stop.

His son will never come back to the farm.  

I think I understand why this picture sold at 15,4 million dollars in 2006. 

And because it is my favorite, this is “Shiner”

i think mostly people think, when imagining how glass is cut, that you use a saw, or a special knife, and it goes through all the way like cutting anything else. when you hand cut glass, you use a glass cutter, which is a little tiny sharp wheel with a handle, to score the glass. it introduces a point of weakness. then you break it. you can use your hands, the edge of a counter, a special tool called running pliers, grozers, tap it with the end of the glass cutter, it doesn’t matter. you introduce a crack, and the break, ideally, follows the weakness you’ve introduced to the glass via scoreline, and your glass is cut.

curves are more difficult. glass likes to break along straight lines, crystalline. sharp curves can become impossible; inside curves are notoriously hard. sometimes the glass has inherent weaknesses, invisible until tested, that will ruin your break. some glass is much harder to break than other glass. some glass gives like putty, elegantly twisting, sweet in your hands. some glass is so tough that you may never coax it into the shape you want.

i don’t like thinking about this metaphorically. i don’t want to apply the logic to myself. people are not glass. people are not glass.

i like to work with curves. even though they’re the hardest part, even though i waste glass when i fail. i love circles, sharp dips, peaks and valleys. curves so sharp they refuse to break; curves so deep i burn out bits early grinding the glass into shape when i cannot convince it to take the score. stubbornly chasing projects that would make far more experienced artists than me frown at the pattern. i can’t stop myself. i want what i want. it’s my glass, my money to waste, my energy and time.

i don’t like thinking about that metaphorically either. people aren’t glass. i’m not glass.

you might be surprised how much glass can take. i’ve gotten much more familiar with how to handle it, what kind of pressures to use, when to be gentle, careful, and when i can relax. it becomes exponentially stronger as the pieces get smaller. below an inch or so, i could fumble and drop a bit of glass on the floor without flinching- that won’t break. above twelve by twelve, i start to move pieces vertically. if you handle a large enough piece of glass carelessly, hold it horizontal for too long or at the wrong angles or with the wrong pressure, it can spontaneously break under its own weight- more than that, you can introduce hidden weaknesses, exacerbate them, create problems for yourself later.

i don’t like metaphors in my glass studio.

i make a lot of nature pieces. a cicada wing, a moth. honeycombs. mushrooms. a windchime inspired by cattails, a panel of cattails. flowers. sunrises. i like to create in the image of soft things, things that would bend, things that aren’t brittle. matte things, opaque things. something about the contrast is satisfying. i want to see them lit up, vibrant & translucent, that holy quality that puts stained glass in church windows. forever-crocus. shining dusty insects. organic, messy, elemental shapes, curves and curves, soft and straining, glowing. coaxing cracks that want to fly across the surface into the channel the scoreline dug. it doesn’t come away neat. it comes away sharp. you always need to grind down the edges, every time, on every piece you cut.

i don’t like metaphors these days. i’m so tired. i don’t force my mind into tight curves anymore. i save that for the glass. my head i draw straight paths for, shallow and forgiving and slow in the turns. i’m not glass. i’m not glass

sometimes i buy scrap glass- bits that came off other people’s bigger projects, big enough to work with but oddly shaped. once in a while those pieces will have scorelines drawn across them- evidence of somebody’s failed break, their abandoned attempts. the first thing i always do with those pieces is finish the break. i don’t want to reach for it thinking there’s more unblemished glass there than there actually is. don’t like unfinished business.

i’m not glass i’m not glass i’m not glass i’m not glass i’m not

those scraps are always good. sometimes they’re surprisingly big, always cheap. perfectly functional and beautiful glass, just in off dimensions. it’s enjoyable to make a puzzle out of it- figure out what pattern will work, what pieces will fit. what can i make out of this? where can i put it? what function will it have, no longer discarded?

i’m not glass i’m not glass i’m not glass

i made a nightlight out of some beautiful scrap pieces, added details to a lamp with others. lots of scrap in my luna moth- highlights and entire chimes of my windchime. i made an entire, gorgeous poppy flower, bigger than my hand, out of only scrap red pieces. red is the most expensive color of glass, did you know that? it’s made with gold- always has been. i guess it’s just the best way to do it, still, even if it makes it pricy. i don’t really buy whole red sheets, just because the prices make me wince. even the castoffs are more expensive than other scrap.

i’m not glass

i’m really proud of that poppy- i wish i had taken more pictures before i gave it away. it went to my tattoo artist. maybe i’ll make another one sometime. orange could be fun, even if it’s less traditional poppy color. i’ve always liked poppies

i’m not

just because they’re so simple and delicate. all symbolism aside. their petals are so thin- it’s like paper, like four sheets of tissue paper wrapped around. i actually don’t think i’ve ever tried growing them- maybe i should try growing them this year

i’m not

i think that would be nice. i could have the glass poppy in my window and look out into my garden and have them there too. i’d like that

i’m not

i think that would be nice. you can see the sun through poppy flower petals, actually, i think, because they’re so thin. they’re like stained glass flowers

i’m

ekphrastic poetry with victoria chang (featuring works of john ashbery, joy harjo, paul tran)

the literature of obsession with julia may jonas (obsession as transformation, destruction, catharsis and form)

place, space and landscape with alexandra kleeman (featuring didion, okorafor and hernan diaz)

lyric research with ross gay (books that combine research with an “I” like nelson’s bluets or christle’s the crying book)

hybrid poetry with ocean vuong (traditions, innovations and possibilities featuring bhanu kapil, rimbaud, clifton)

multigenre experiments in form with paul lisicky (for writing that explores connections between genres)

reading about writers with peter ho davies (books that teach the craft and give writing advice, think ‘the outline’ trilogy)

speculative women with lina maria ferreira cabeza-vanegas (a look at speculative works by women writers like jemisin, butler, k le guin)

writers and the world with viet thanh nguyen (rankine, baldwin, and coates)

Mary was a beautiful baby, sweet and affectionate, but by the time she’s three she’s turned difficult and strange, with fey moods and a stubborn mouth that screams and bites but never says mama. But her mother’s well-used to hard work with little thanks, and when the village gossips wag their tongues she just shrugs, and pulls her difficult child away from their precious, perfect blossoms, before the bites draw blood. Mary’s mother doesn’t drown her in a bucket of saltwater, and she doesn’t take up the silver knife the wife of the village priest leaves out for her one Sunday brunch. 

She gives her daughter yarn, instead, and instead of a rowan stake through her inhuman heart she gives her a child’s first loom, oak and ash. She lets her vicious, uncooperative fairy daughter entertain herself with games of her own devising, in as much peace and comfort as either of them can manage.

Mary grows up strangely, as a strange child would, learning everything in all the wrong order, and biting a great deal more than she should. But she also learns to weave, and takes to it with a grand passion. Soon enough she knows more than her mother–which isn’t all that much–and is striking out into unknown territory, turning out odd new knots and weaves, patterns as complex as spiderwebs and spellrings. 

“Aren’t you clever,” her mother says, of her work, and leaves her to her wool and flax and whatnot. Mary’s not biting anymore, and she smiles more than she frowns, and that’s about as much, her mother figures, as anyone should hope for from their child. 

Mary still cries sometimes, when the other girls reject her for her strange graces, her odd slow way of talking, her restless reaching fluttering hands that have learned to spin but never to settle. The other girls call her freak, witchblood, hobgoblin.

“I don’t remember girls being quite so stupid when I was that age,” her mother says, brushing Mary’s hair smooth and steady like they’ve both learned to enjoy, smooth as a skein of silk. “Time was, you knew not to insult anyone you might need to flatter later. ‘Specially when you don’t know if they’re going to grow wings or horns or whatnot. Serve ‘em all right if you ever figure out curses.”

“I want to go back,” Mary says. “I want to go home, to where I came from, where there’s people like me. If I’m a fairy’s child I should be in fairyland, and no one would call me a freak.”

“Aye, well, I’d miss you though,” her mother says. “And I expect there’s stupid folk everywhere, even in fairyland. Cruel folk, too. You just have to make the best of things where you are, being my child instead.”

Mary learns to read well enough, in between the weaving, especially when her mother tracks down the traveling booktraders and comes home with slim, precious manuals on dyes and stains and mordants, on pigments and patterns, diagrams too arcane for her own eyes but which make her daughter’s eyes shine.

“We need an herb garden,” her daughter says, hands busy, flipping from page to page, pulling on her hair, twisting in her skirt, itching for a project. “Yarrow, and madder, and woad and weld…”

“Well, start digging,” her mother says. “Won’t do you a harm to get out of the house now’n then.”

Mary doesn’t like dirt but she’s learned determination well enough from her mother. She digs and digs, and plants what she’s given, and the first year doesn’t turn out so well but the second’s better, and by the third a cauldron’s always simmering something over the fire, and Mary’s taking in orders from girls five years older or more, turning out vivid bolts and spools and skeins of red and gold and blue, restless fingers dancing like they’ve summoned down the rainbow. Her mother figures she probably has.

“Just as well you never got the hang of curses,” she says, admiring her bright new skirts. “I like this sort of trick a lot better.”

Mary smiles, rocking back and forth on her heels, fingers already fluttering to find the next project.

She finally grows up tall and fair, if a bit stooped and squinty, and time and age seem to calm her unhappy mouth about as well as it does for human children. Word gets around she never lies or breaks a bargain, and if the first seems odd for a fairy’s child then the second one seems fit enough. The undyed stacks of taken orders grow taller, the dyed lots of filled orders grow brighter, the loom in the corner for Mary’s own creations grows stranger and more complex. Mary’s hands callus just like her mother’s, become as strong and tough and smooth as the oak and ash of her needles and frames, though they never fall still.

“Do you ever wonder what your real daughter would be like?” the priest’s wife asks, once.

Mary’s mother snorts. “She wouldn’t be worth a damn at weaving,” she says. “Lord knows I never was. No, I’ll keep what I’ve been given and thank the givers kindly. It was a fair enough trade for me. Good day, ma’am.”

Mary brings her mother sweet chamomile tea, that night, and a warm shawl in all the colors of a garden, and a hairbrush. In the morning, the priest’s son comes round, with payment for his mother’s pretty new dress and a shy smile just for Mary. He thinks her hair is nice, and her hands are even nicer, vibrant in their strength and skill and endless motion.  

They all live happily ever after.

*

Here’s another story: 

I once picked up a Ruth Rendell novel for the cover. Someone I trust derided the writing with “all her books are like ‘this’”. They weren’t wrong, but I’m glad I read that book because *plot twist spoiler time* halfway through a main character is murdered. The suspects are glaringly obvious, yet their involvement cannot be proven and they get away with it, seemingly forever. At the end of the book, the murder victim’s secret admirer finds the murder weapon in her boyfriend’s possessions. AND THAT HIT LIKE A SACK OF BRICKS BECAUSE Rendell had flatly informed the reader that the boyfriend was jealous of this crush on the other character, and later showed that the bf was a crude, abusive person. But the buildup and the intrigue and the way the boyfriend was portrayed as a background character all made you just FORGET that he was an equally viable suspect. It was an extremely believable plot twist and made you feel so silly for missing the plainly stated clues.

                Subtext in writing is everything characters don’t say. If you’ve been following me for a while you know one of my favourite things to say is “Characters never say what they mean” that’s subtext—it’s the implied, the unsaid, the hints picked up by readers, and it’s one of the most important parts of creating meaning in writing.

                Let me explain. A parent and their child are talking over the phone, maybe the context is the child moved out after a particularly bad argument and this is the first time they’re speaking since it happened. The kid says, “I really miss you and the rest of the family, I’m sorry for what happened, let’s not fight anymore.”

                The scene kind of falls flat. Where’s the conflict? The dynamic? The challenge? Through the child just saying exactly what they mean, we lose out on a lot of meaning—kind of ironically.

Instead, maybe they say, “They have daisies growing in the garden here, I think Clara would like them.” Better—we’re implying this kid is thinking of their sister, that they’re feeling a little homesick, or nostalgic for their old life. We’re saying they miss the family, they’re trying to connect again with Clara so they’re sorry for what happened, they’re calling because they don’t want to fight anymore.

                But without saying that, the parent can reply, “She’s into roses now.” A rejection of that connection, the portrayal that whatever that old life was has been tainted forever—it can’t just come back.

                That’s a very quick example, but there’s so much subtext you can create with the simplest of scenes. One of my favourite scenes I’ve ever written was two friends walking through a museum talking about the exhibits, but really they were talking about legacy, and their fear of their own morality, all without ever saying that out loud.

                People never say what they mean because saying what you mean is scary. Had the child asked outright for that connection, they would have been opening up to outright rejection. Instead, the relationship can hide behind this implication—words between words. Subtext.